Chapter 6. Marketing Tools

The online marketplace is crowded. Thousands of new stores are coming online each day. With Magento 2, you have one of the most powerful open source platforms for presenting and selling your products and services. But to be noticed — and to create valuable repeat business — you have to do more than just point a domain name to your store.

The key is marketing: presenting a selling proposition to potential customers that will entice them to at least visit your online showroom.

In this chapter, we will explore some of Magento's key marketing tools, including:

Customer groups
Promotions
Newsletters
Sitemaps
Search engine optimization

As you prepare your store for launch, you need to spend some time becoming familiar with how these tools can help you attract and close more sales.

Customer groups

If you're new to e-commerce, you may not quite have a handle on how to group your potential customers outside of retail and wholesale. Most of you will build retail stores, fewer will build wholesale businesses, and even fewer will do both.

Yet, if you give some careful thought to how you intend to market to your customers, you may find that there are more customers segments you need to identify. Here are examples of some other possible customer groups:

Distributors who will re-sell your product to retailers
Tax-exempt organizations, such as charities or government agencies
Groups or teams, such as associations or athletic leagues
Professionals, as opposed to hobbyists or amateurs
Certified or approved buyers meeting a licensing or other qualification

Note

Customer groups in Magento are not to be confused with customer profiles, such as age, sex, or preferences. A customer can only belong to one Magento group, so profile attributes cannot really be accommodated.

As you contemplate your groups, consider the following:

Groups should be segments of your customer base that might have different pricing, benefits, or product focus
Groups can be used (as we'll see later in this chapter) for specific marketing promotions using newsletters and promotional codes
Groups can be assigned different tax classes for the purpose of charging (or not charging) sales tax

By default, Magento creates three customer groups: General, Retailer, and Wholesale. When a customer registers in your store, they are automatically put into the General group. You can manually assign a customer to another group, either after they have registered or if you create the customer yourself in the administrative backend to your store.

Creating a customer group

Creating a new customer group is perhaps the simplest operation in Magento!

Go to Stores | Customer Groups in your Administration menu.
Click on Add New Customer Group.
Enter a Group Name.
Assign a Tax Class.
Click on Save Customer Group.

And that's all there is to it. Now that you understand how customer groups are created in Magento, let's see how we can use these for marketing.

Table of Contents for Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores

Chapter 6. Marketing Tools

Customer groups

Note

Creating a customer group

Table of Contents for
Magento 2 - Build World-Class online stores